what’s happening in my house these days

Seems to me, if you step away from your blog for a quick snack and don’t come back for months, your return post better have a hook. I spent some time thinking about it, and finally determined that the best way to jump back in would be with a tale of dreams-come-true.

Let’s travel back to December, where we last left off. (I know, it’s so 2010.) Here’s a quick reminder of those halcyon days…

The fridge covered with gorgeous Christmas cards from our family and friends…

An unbelievably stormy Christmas Day – it poured buckets and we wondered if anyone would venture out to our open house in the afternoon.

Thank heavens they did – how would we have eaten that mound of carrots and sugar snap peas by ourselves? Cheese I can handle, but crudite should never be tackled alone.

But I digress.

The kids had a wonderful morning and received some stellar gifts, but there was a whopper in there. Anyone who knows Honey will remember that she’s waged an ongoing campaign for a dog for at least 5 years. The girl is nothing if not persistent. Well, this year she wrote a letter to Santa that basically said – Please could I have a dog. That’s it, nothing else. We told her not to get her hopes up. Christmas arrived, she loved the presents and was super happy – even when we had a gift mixup that resulted in her thinking for a while that a tea cozy Gini had sent for me was a new hat, she was delighted. Then she pulled this out from under the tree -

A letter from the jolly man himself, telling her that somewhere there was a dog that needed our family, and her job was to find it. Honey went ballistic.

And that, my friends, is where the caroling ended and the crazy began.

The great hunt was on – we visited shelters all along the Northern California coast, and we went waaay off the beaten track. We met a LOT of dogs.

I remember when Tom and I were first looking for our house, I kept thinking that one day we’d walk into a house and just know it was the one. A year later, I had my doubts. We found it, but I never had that epiphany I expected. Turns out the dog search went very much the same way. We met so many great dogs. They all seemed to have potential, but I never had that resonating moment. Of course our kids had that resonating moment with every single solitary animal we came across, including a couple of cats and a horse. That made the search just a bit more fraught, as every time we turned away from a shelter empty armed, they were crushed.

However. Eventually it clicked. We went to the Humane Society one more time and met an extremely bouncy, fun puppy. She was wriggly and happy and incredibly friendly, and most importantly she had a sister. The sister was not quite so bouncy. She was a bit shy, and the first thing she did when we approached her was to sit down and look up at us. The volunteers at the Humane Society told us that the bouncy friendly puppy was perfect for a family with kids, and we thought about it, and then we all agreed that we liked the quiet one better.

We named her Captain Twix. Isn’t she adorable?

Look at that face. Doesn’t it just melt your heart? Could a perfect face like that ever cause you any grief?

As it turns out, it can. Oh yes.

So there you have it, I lied up above. My returning blog hook is not actually a dreams-come-true story – it’s a cliffhanger.